spongetaro
Elite member
- Messages
- 717
- Reaction score
- 42
- Points
- 0
I've found this text shows the linguitsic relationships between proto IE and semitic languages and the historical links between Kurgan cultures and West Asian/ Central Asian neolithic cultures.
http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/indo-european-urheimat-elst.html
The part about the mesolithic culture of Jebel could explains the prsence of Gedrosia admixture among proto IE people.
http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/indo-european-urheimat-elst.html
Semitic (and by implication also the Chadic, Kushitic and Hamitic branches of the Afro-Asiatic family, assumed to be the result of a pre-4th-millennium immigration of early agriculturists from West Asia into North Africa) is suspected to spring from a common ancestor with IE, even by scholars skeptical of Nostratic adventures. The commonality of some elementary lexical items is striking, and includes the numerals 6 and 7 (Hebrew shisha, shiva, Arabic sitta, sab'a, conceivably borrowed at the time when counting was extended beyond the fingers of a single hand for the first time), arguably even all the first seven numerals.
Contact with Akkadian (the Semitic language of Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC) and even Proto-Semitic is attested by a good handful of words, esp. some terms for utensils and animals. This includes two terms for "axe": PIE *peleku, Greek pelekus, Ossetic faeraet, Sanskrit parashu, "axe", related (one way or the other) to Akkadian pilaqqu, "axe", cfr. Arabic falaqa, "to split apart"; and PIE *sekwr, Latin securis, "axe", secula, "hatchet", Old Slavic sekyra, "hatchet", related to a Semitic root yielding Akkadian shukurru, "javelin", Hebrew segor, "axe". Some terms are in common only with the Western IE languages, e.g. Semitic gedi, still recognizable in English goat. This testimony is too slender, though, for concluding that the Western Indo-Europeans had come from the East and encountered the Semites on their way to the West. Even more remarkable are the common fundamental grammatical traits, which indicate a common genetic origin rather than an influence from the one language family on the other. Semitic, like IE, has grammatically functional vowel changes, grammatical gender, declension, conjugational categories including participles and medial and passive modes, and a range of phonemes which in Proto-Semitic was almost entirely in common with PIE, even more so if we assume PIE laryngeals to match Semitic aleph, he and 'ayn. Many of these grammatical elements are shared only by Semitic (or Afro-Asiatic) and IE, setting them off as a pair against all other language families. If any language family has a chance of being the sister of the IE family, it is Semitic. One way to imagine how Semitic and IE went their separate ways has been offered by Bernard Sergent, who is strongly convinced of the two families' common origin. He combines the linguistic evidence with archaeological and anthropological indications that the (supposedly PIE-speaking) Kurgan people in the North-Caspian area of ca. 4000 BC came from the southeast, a finding which might otherwise be cited in support of their Indian origin. Thus, the Kurgan people's typical grain was millet, not the rye and wheat cultivated by the Old Europeans, and in ca. 5000 BC, millet had been cultivated in what is now Turkmenistan (it apparently originates in China), particularly in the mesolithic culture of Jebel. From there on, the archaeological traces become really tenuous, but Sergent claims to discern a link with the Zarzian culture of Kurdistan 10,000 to 8500 BC. Short, he suggests that the Kurgan people had come along the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea, not from the southeast (India) but the southwest, in or near Mesopotamia, where PIE may have had a common homeland with Semitic.24
However, those who interpret the archaeological data concerning the genesis of agriculture in the Indus site of Mehrgarh as being the effect of a diffusion from West Asia, may well interpret an eventual kinship of IE with Semitic as proving their own point: along with its material culture, Mehrgarh's language may have been an offshoot of a metropolitan model, viz. a Proto-Semitic-speaking culture in West Asia. This would mean that the Indus area was indeed the homeland of the original PIE, but that in the preceding millennia, PIE had been created by the interaction of Proto-Semitic-speaking colonists from West Asia with locals. On the other hand, now that the case for an independent genesis of the Neolithic revolution (i.e. the development of agriculture) in Mehrgarh is getting stronger, we may have to reconsider the direction of such a process.
The part about the mesolithic culture of Jebel could explains the prsence of Gedrosia admixture among proto IE people.